Bangkok, Oct 3 (EFE).- Police in Thailand have arrested a 14-year-old boy suspected of carrying out a deadly shooting at a luxury shopping mall in Bangkok on Tuesday.
Authorities confirmed on social media that the boy has been taken into police custody following the incident at the Siam Paragon shopping center, one of the most popular malls in the heart of the Thai capital, amid confusion over the death toll.
Emergency services initially said three people had died, later lowering the toll to one, before police eventually confirmed the deaths of two people, a Chinese woman and a man from Myanmar.
Three others were injured, two of them seriously, police said.
The incident occurred at around 4:30 pm local time. Less than an hour after the shooting began, officers were able to detain and arrest the suspect.
After the gunshots were reported, police evacuated the mall, while the nearby elevated urban rail station was temporarily suspended.
Hundreds of people ran out of the doors of the mall after hearing the gunshots, as seen in videos posted online.
Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thaivisin took to X (formerly Twitter) to send his condolences to the families of the deceased and the injured and thanked police for apprehending the suspect.
Thailand, a country with a population of 71 million, is home to more than 10 million guns.
In October last year a police officer killed 36 people, including 24 children, and wounded 10 others in the northeast of the country.
In 2020, 29 people were killed and 58 others were wounded when a soldier opened fire at a shopping mall in another northeastern province before being shot dead by police.
These kinds of shootings, which were previously extremely rare in Thailand, have led to growing calls to curb the number of weapons in the southeast Asian nation, where violent crime is significantly lower than the global average, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). EFE
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